And additionally, we’re still in the ramp-up period of the new brass foundry improving those — improving those PPAP processes. And I would also say there remains a fairly high level of uncertainty in the external environment. So residential construction has slowed. Product lead times and project timelines are improving. I expect that the backlog levels could normalize over the coming quarters, depending on end market activity. So, I expect to get a clear sense of the sell-through in the channel and the channel inventory plans as we move into the spring construction season. I think that will be a critical time being as we look at what happens with the sell-through in the channel inventories. And I think that will set the pace for the balance of the year.
So I think we elected — when we look here, certainly a little better first quarter than anticipated — but we elected to kind of keep our powder dry as we look at the rest of the year, I think there’s a couple of ways this can go. And I would speak to everybody and say, the most important elements for our guidance to be met is to hit our throughput numbers at our own facilities and not hit throughput by using other people’s materials or outsourced materials. And those are going to be the keys for execution. And I think it’s just too soon to say where we are on that path.
Operator: Next question is from Bryan Blair with Oppenheimer.
Bryan Blair: Solid start to the year, good to see that price continues to outpace inflation being 4 quarters into that catch-up process. Are you now at a point where price/cost is margin accretive year-on-year? Or is that still pending?
John Hall: Well, year-on-year, I guess, you could argue that it is accretive. But as you know, Bryan, we don’t measure it that way. We go back to the trough. We know that the entire inflationary cycle is multiple years on. So when we said in our prepared comments at the end there that we expect to be back to pre-pandemic margins in ’25. We are looking at the rate of accretion. So we’re still not accretive to inflation over the entire cycle going back to 2020 but we expect that we will be back to breakeven on the dilution effect at 20 — sometime this year if the price that’s trapped in the backlog and the throughput assumptions we have in there, we’ll kind of get back the price piece sometime in 2023. We believe that we’ll be at pre-pandemic margins in 2025.
So the price piece of it is one part of it but the actual throughput and getting rid of the outsource and getting rid of the other things won’t have us back to pre-pandemic margins until 2025. So I hope that answers it. We’ll be accretive year-on-year but we still got a ways to go to get back to when the inflationary cycle began in 2020 and the headwinds associated with the outsourced and the other product inefficiencies or manufacturing inefficiencies, we won’t have those out of our system until we can close that second foundry until we can hit all of our production targets internally and we anticipate everything to be back to pre-pandemic margins by 2025.
Bryan Blair: Yes. I appreciate all the color there. I guess to simplify that progression, it would be getting back to recovering margin price/cost this year, stamping out inefficiencies into next year and then allowing for the read-through of the projects once you are past completion and at that full run rate, driving the — I think it’s $30 million or so in benefits that you’ve called that would be ’24 into ’25. Is that kind of the step forward?
